By Neal Glatt

As 2020 comes to a close, you may look back and be disappointed with your sales volume.  Or maybe you’re concerned about slipping profit margins.  If so, you’re not alone.  A year ago, a client of mine was in exactly the same place.  Here’s how we worked together to help him grow from sales of just $96,000 in 2019 to over $999,000 in 2020, and how you can 10X your sales this year too.

The first step to finding sales success is to have a defined process.  Every successful sale follows the same steps, so knowing exactly what those are is extremely important.  The sales process helps ensure that each prospect we spend time with has a need for our service, the budget to afford the service, and the ability to make the decision to go with us. 

The best part of having a well-defined process is that we know if someone isn’t going to buy from us.  When we stop spending time with prospects who won’t buy, we can move on to spending time with prospects who will buy.  Let’s pretend your close rate is 20%, meaning for every 5 people we send a proposal to, only 1 ends up buying from us.  What if we could cut off 2 of the four who didn’t buy from us before we even send them a proposal?  We’d have just saved ourselves 40% of our time and our close rate goes from 20% (1 in 5) to 33% (1 in 3).  That alone helps us increase our sales 65% year over year!

The second step to 10X sales is to dial in our target market.  When we know exactly what type of prospect likes to buy from us, our chances of closing that deal more often and at higher profitability increase substantially.  To do so, we need to really define our services and the clients that would be interested in purchasing them so we don’t pursue the wrong leads that we will inevitably lose.

I like to have target markets defined to six levels of detail so that we are hyper-focused only on those opportunities which will always have a good chance of closing.  That includes the detailed segment of the market, average location quantity and/or size, geographic location, key features desired, average budget, and services they buy.  Getting this detailed about potential customers means we always have at least a pretty good fit when we reach out.

The third step to exponential sales growth is to sell on value instead of price.  What I mean by this is to start to eliminate the budget objection because you’re never the lowest price (if you’re always the lowest price, then you have unlimited work available).  So instead of worrying about what other providers bid for a competitive service, or negotiating our price down leaving us with too little profit, we need to sell the value the customer will get.

Usually this involves negotiating better.  Salespeople need to be willing to walk away from the deal instead of reducing scope, price, or profitability to a customer’s demands.  While there are some scripts that sometimes help, what value-based selling really requires is confidence, practice, and solid qualification of prospects at the beginning of the process.  When we call on quality prospects, they will value our services enough to buy even when the price is higher because the value is extraordinary.

If you want to increase your sales in 2021, we’d love to help.  We’ve created a two-week virtual bootcamp, starting Feb. 15, where Neal Glatt will walk you step-by-step through all of these key principles, and more, to sell more landscaping and snow services at a higher profit than you ever have before.  Each Monday and Friday you will join Neal for a LIVE one-hour workshop to develop these tools for yourself and put into practice the new skills you learn each day from short, on-demand lessons designed to help you sell more in 2021.  A company pass for five attendees only costs $89, but space is limited so sign up here today and make 2021 your best sales year ever!

This program is proudly sponsored by FBinsure. FBinsure provides insurance and risk management services to innovative businesses throughout the country.  FB Risk Advisors utilize proactive strategies and technology to help clients identify, analyze, and control risk, and achieve their goals.  Click here to learn more about their landscaping and snow insurance programs!